


Getting lost at twelve

by ToxicPineapple



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Fluffy, Gonta is tired, Implied Feelings, Implied Insomnia, Late-Night Vibes, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Post-Game, Pre-Relationship, angst if you squint, but no real angst, virtual reality au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22276708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToxicPineapple/pseuds/ToxicPineapple
Summary: It makes Shuichi’s pale skin glow white, a little bit, and catches on his eyelashes, which flutter as he scans the darkness for Gonta’s gaze. (It occurs to Gonta that Shuichi can’t see him nearly as well as he sees Shuichi, as Shuichi is in the light, but Gonta is in the dark. And anyway, Shuichi’s eyes have never been that good.)---Gonta has difficulty sleeping.
Relationships: Gokuhara Gonta/Saihara Shuichi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	Getting lost at twelve

Gonta is probably a bit more meticulous than he needs to be about smoothing out all the creases in his bedsheets.

In truth, it’s more of a compulsory thing than a real necessity; it’s like he can’t actually lie down and go to sleep until he’s certain that his sheets are perfectly straightened out. The little lumps under his back shouldn’t be a problem-- wouldn’t, actually, under ordinary circumstances, but since waking up from the simulation, any small discomfort that is entirely unrelated to what happened in the killing game has been viewed as a blessing in disguise. It’s extremely tedious, and he never falls asleep quickly anymore because he keeps having to get up and fix the sheets all over again, but… it’s preferable, in so many ways, than staring at the ceiling with glazed eyes until sleep overtakes him from behind.

He’s tried counting sheep before, but he always gets lost somewhere around ten, because in his mind ten and twelve sound exactly the same, and then he’s shooting back and forth between fourteen and sixteen, twenty and eighteen, on and on until his temple is throbbing and he loses track of the numbers altogether. There are too many of them, numbers, and counting them would be great if it was only repetition, but he’s never been able to get to a thousand, and that’s frustrating in a way that makes it hard for him to sleep through.

He wouldn’t call it insomnia. The getting lost at twelve and pushing himself out from under the covers to smooth out the bedsheets every few moments. He’s pretty sure that he  _ could  _ fall asleep more quickly, if he really genuinely wanted to, but it’s just easier to get distracted by the trivialities. When he’s specifically focusing on counting or straightening his sheets, it’s hard to turn off his mind enough to fall asleep, for sure-- but it also doesn’t allow his brain the space to wander to dangerous topics, like it so often gets when he’s on the brink of falling unconscious.

It’s getting closer to the other side of the night by now, and he’s gotten up either ten or twelve times to fix the sheets underneath him, and he feels like he’s going to make an eleventh or thirteenth here in a second because the tiny tiny wrinkle in his lower back was fine before but it’s rapidly causing a tight, hot feeling to rise in his chest, and that’s going to turn into something much much worse if he doesn’t just fix the problem. Doing the same thing too many times always makes him feel achey, and stiff, like his limbs weigh a million pounds and he has to move them anyway, but it’s better than the alternative. It’s better than shooting bolt upright and shoving the cart by his bed over into the wall with a loud and painful crash, which he knows would wake everyone up, and that’s really not idea.

Gonta isn’t a violent person, he isn’t prone to lashing out in that way, even when he feels strongly, but it’s so much easier to shove something inanimate right now under the cover of night because there’s nobody here to feel frightened by it. If he shoves the cart over, which he’s not going to do, someone will come running in, and they’ll be worried about him, but they won’t be  _ scared.  _ Gonta doesn’t think he could take it if they were scared of him, honestly. He knows that he looks so scary already. He doesn’t need to top that with any real, true reasons for them to fear him.

He’s screwing his eyes shut, trying to just fall asleep and ignore the stupid thing, when the door to his room squeaks as it opens and again when it closes. Gonta entertains briefly the thought that it’s a nurse, coming in to check on him, but it’s been a while since he’s needed any real medical attention. Unlike people like Himiko and Kokichi, who are so little already, he’s been adjusting to being out of the simulation a lot better than everyone else. And he’s not the type to have the full-body-screaming night terrors, his nightmares always end with him jolting awake, the side of his face pressed against a wet pillow, and by the time he’s eating breakfast with everyone else he’s convinced himself to smile and share some bug fact so that nobody worries. It’s not going to be a nurse.

Cracking open his eyes, Gonta’s gaze flits around. He sees alright, even though his only light source is the thin sliver of white light from the streetlamp just outside his window. He’s always been better at seeing in the dark than the average person, and the person who’s just answered is standing right where the light peeks through the curtain. It makes Shuichi’s pale skin glow white, a little bit, and catches on his eyelashes, which flutter as he scans the darkness for Gonta’s gaze. (It occurs to Gonta that Shuichi can’t see him nearly as well as he sees Shuichi, as Shuichi is in the light, but Gonta is in the dark. And anyway, Shuichi’s eyes have never been that good.)

Gonta opens his mouth to ask if Shuichi is alright, if he’s had a nightmare, if he needs comfort or just wants to talk, but his voice dies in his throat when the other boy pads over, silently lifting the blanket and crawling in under the covers beside him.

He’s a bit cold, but Shuichi is always pretty cold. (Even in the simulation, at the end of that awful trial, when Shuichi held his hand, his hand was  _ freezing.)  _ He’s not shaking, which Gonta can tell because they’re very close to each other all of a sudden, and when his grey eyes shift over, brows lifting silently, Gonta reads the look in his eye as inquisitive, not troubled.

Even so, he asks, “Is-- Is Shuichi alright?” Because he’s really not sure why else Shuichi would crawl into his bed past midnight, silently tucking himself underneath the blanket. Gonta isn’t opposed to offering comfort if Shuichi had a nightmare, but he’d like some communication on the other end of the equation, first-- even a non-verbal indication would be alright, just something more than the blank look on Shuichi’s face, and the unnerving, unbefitting stillness of the other boy’s shoulders.

“I’m okay,” he murmurs, and he sounds like it. Delicate, maybe, but that’s due more to the hour than any particular ailments, Gonta thinks, because his voice is very steady. Not shaky, like it would be if he  _ had  _ had a nightmare. A lot of their classmates, Angie and Kirumi and Kiyo especially, are excellent at masking it when they’re upset. At putting on a perfect face of neutrality. But Shuichi isn’t, not really, when he’s upset it’s very easy to tell, and Gonta really just doesn’t think that it’s the case right now. Still, he’s having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Shuichi is here.

He doesn’t say anything else, though, just shuffles around a bit under the blanket and then turns over, onto his side, so that he’s facing Gonta with his whole person. One of his arms is tucked under the side of his head, propping it up a little bit, but the way his eyelashes flutter suggest that he’s sleepy, and Gonta watches him for a moment.

It’s harder to see him now, that he’s no longer standing under the light, but he can still make out his features. The relaxed set of his eyebrows, the way his lips part a bit for him to breathe, pale skin and clear eyes and a scattering of acne across his forehead. His lips are chapped, and Gonta has seen them chewed raw before, but they look regular now, plain and alright, just chapped. His right hand is there between them, open and resting on the mattress; his fingers are long and slim, and his palm is a nice shape, even paler than the rest of his arm. Gonta’s skin is darker, more of an olive, a permanent tan built into his skin from living in the wilderness, but Shuichi could never have gone outside in his life and that would make a whole lot of sense to Gonta, for how pale he is.

(He must burn like crazy during the summer.)

Shuichi’s looking up at him, his lips quirked just the slightest bit, and there’s something warm in his eyes that makes Gonta think,  _ well, okay,  _ before he shuffles down and under the blanket all the way, turning on his side so that he’s still facing the detective. They’re so close together that they might be trading breaths, and Gonta can hear his own heartbeat through the pillow that his ear his pressed against, but more than that he hears Shuichi, breathing faintly but audibly in the dark room.

“Shuichi?” Gonta asks again, but his voice is so faint now that they both must understand that he doesn’t really mean it. Shuichi’s eyes have closed by now, the exquisite water-like grey hidden between pale lids, but one of his hands shifts, and touches Gonta’s face; feels its way down until it rests on his lips, a single digit pressing down there for a moment before receding, and Gonta understands.

So he closes his eyes, all wrinkles and lumps in the sheets forgotten, and falls asleep to the lullaby of Shuichi’s breathing.

Gonta wakes up slowly, gradually, and when his eyes flutter open he watches shadows dance across the ceiling for a moment, shrouded in golden light from the sun that streams through the curtains, and smiles at the warmth in his chest, even though he doesn’t remember the reason for it just yet. But he becomes aware of the additional weight on the bed eventually, and the sound of breathing that doesn’t belong to him, and when he turns his head, his breath catches in his throat, because Shuichi seems to have woken up before him.

His grey eyes look more sunflower coloured in this lighting, and his skin seems to be glowing. His hair is messy (he must roll somewhat; Gonta does too, hence why he woke up on his back) but he’s smiling so prettily that Gonta forgets how to speak for a moment, forgets to wonder about why the other boy is even there, and for the longest time simply appreciates that smile on his face, and the warmth radiating off of him that wasn’t there last night.

Eventually, though, his voice does return, and it occurs to him that he doesn’t know why Shuichi came into his room in the first place. If it was a nightmare, and Shuichi is feeling better now, Gonta doesn’t want to drag him back to it, but-- well, he’d like to get at least a little bit of an inkling about what it was that brought Shuichi to his door so late at night. He’ll drop it if Shuichi shows even the first signs of discomfort.

“Was Shuichi alright, last night?” Gonta asks gently. The detective blinks at him, lazily tilting his head to the side, and nods his head. “Okay. Uhm, he didn’t have any nightmares?”

“No,” Shuichi rests his chin down on folded arms, his smile crinkling his eyes in a way that Gonta has never seen before. “I just thought that you’ve looked really tired recently.”

It takes a second for Gonta to process what Shuichi has said, ten seconds actually, and not twelve, and his heart stutters all of a sudden and all at once, a warmth spreading across his face. “Oh.” Gonta utters, but the syllable is nowhere near capturing how he feels. He clears his throat, wanting very badly to try again. “So…” he inhales, exhales, in a much more controlled way than he feels possible or warranted. “You came in because--”

“Yes,” Shuichi interrupts softly. “Did it help at all? I didn’t want to intrude, but I was a bit too tired to communicate what I was thinking.” Another kind of smile creeps across his expression. “You, ah, are a very warm person, Gona.”

Gonta smiles at that. He knows as much, and pretty much anybody would probably feel warm to Shuichi, considering how terrible his circulation must be. Still, it makes him feel warm, and a little tingly in his chest. “It helped.” He replies simply, because it feels easier at this time of day, and then he watches Shuichi yawn, cutting himself off as he tries to murmur a  _ good,  _ and bury his forehead back into the mattress. He still seems sleepy, and Gonta feels exceedingly well-rested but he has the exact same feeling, strangely enough, so as Shuichi closes his eyes and doesn’t open them, Gonta follows suit, and sleep takes over him before his mind goes anywhere other than that comfortable place that it settled down thinking about how lovely Shuichi’s smile is when he’s tired.

**Author's Note:**

> SOMEDAY i am going to write saigonta angst
> 
> i've never written from gonta's pov before i don't think so i'm pretty sure this is absolutely terrible
> 
> anyway i'm tired and my partner fell asleep so :pensive: sad boi hours
> 
> take the fluff take it take it take i


End file.
